Wednesday, November 7, 2007

The Day the Internet Died

I had forgotten just how Internet-dependent our business has become. I came in this morning, and the DSL connection wasn’t up. I went to call my boss to let him know so he could call the appropriate people to get it fixed. But I only have his number stored in our online contact management system.

I typed this sentence nearly eight hours ago, when we realized there was a problem with our Internet connection. It’s still down. I’m writing this in Word, and will take it home with me to upload from my home connection.

It’s been different, to say the least. I’m a fan of not having the constant flow of emails to pull my attention. I’m also a fan of not being able to check Lifehacker and Gizmodo, Myspace and all of my friend’s blogs seventeen times daily.

I had to be creative, today, to even find tasks I could take on without the help of the internet. There weren’t many. All of my files are stored online. The two projects I’m currently managing are Internet developments. I can’t do any testing if I can’t get online. I can’t email my developer if I can’t get online. So much is dependent for this company to be online. I’m surprised we were as successful as we were today.

Lessons Learned:

I’ve learned that I can get by without having Outlook check my email every minute. I find I actually got things done. I would start on a task, and compete it, without stopping. When I had Outlook sending me a constant stream of email, I’d find myself stopping every ten minutes or so to take care of something that “couldn’t wait.” We’ll see how I feel about this whenever I check my Inbox in a few minutes from home, but I am a really big fan of the interruption free day I had.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Last Halloween, my office got a virus that had us disconnected from all of our shared files, email, and internet for nearly 3 weeks. The consultants who came in to assist our IT department told us that we were lucky that we're a non-profit. Any for-profit office in the same spot would have gone out of business.

So, I totally feel your pain!

Jim said...

I have the unfortunate tendency to "surf" the internet when I have nothing else to do. As a result I end up spending more money than I need to online. Whenever the internet or my computer is down, I discover things like "reading" and "drawing" again. Makes me feel like a pioneer or something.

Heather K said...

Ummm, you do know you can change your outlook settings, so that it gathers new mail less frequently? Before we switched to gmail corporate, I had mine set to check mail only every half hour--which meant I got thirty minutes of interruption free work instead of 2.

-al said...

I know, I just (used to) like to be on top of things. Now i've seen the light. It's not powered by the internet.

macaela said...

You know, I think you could turn the whole "The day the internet died" into a song. Set to American Pie of course.